Robert W. Hamblin

Robert Wayne Hamblin is
Professor of English and Director of the Center
for Faulkner Studies at Southeast
Missouri State University, where he has taught since 1965. During
his career as teacher, scholar, and writer, his writings have included
both creative writings and nonfiction essays, but he is perhaps
best known for his published work on the fiction of William
Faulkner, which includes a scholarly journal and several volumes
containing miscellaneous writings by and memorabilia about Faulkner.

Hamblin was born on November 5,
1938, in Jericho (Union County), Mississippi, and spent his boyhood
years at nearby Brice’s Cross Roads, or Bethany, where his father
and mother owned and operated a general store just across the road
from the park and monument
marking the site of the famous Civil War battle in which General
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry unit ambushed and routed
superior Union forces under the command of General Samuel Sturgis.
Hamblin attended public schools in Baldwyn until 1954, when his
family moved to Booneville; two years later he was graduated from
Booneville High School.

Hamblin attended college at Northeast
Mississippi Community College in Booneville and Delta
State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, earning his bachelor’s
degree in English education from the latter in 1960. Subsequently
he earned his master’s (1965) and doctoral (1976) degrees in English,
both from the University of Mississippi
in Oxford, where he specialized
in the works of William Faulkner
under the direction of Professor John Pilkington.

Hamblin started his teaching career
as a high school English teacher and baseball coach at Sparrows
Point High School in Baltimore County, Maryland. One of the players
he coached was Ron Swoboda, whom (Hamblin claims) he taught to make
diving catches like the one Swoboda made to save game four of the
1969 World Series for the New
York Mets.

Hamblin was a graduate student
at Ole Miss during the first days of desegregation. As a member
of the Mississippi National Guard federalized by President Kennedy,
he was a witness to the riot that occurred on the eve of James
Meredith’s enrollment in the university. Three years later Hamblin
witnessed another racial confrontation at Ole Miss, the one that
accompanied the participation by a bi-racial delegation from Tougaloo
College in the Southern Literary Festival. Hamblin has described
these events in two essays: “Monuments and Roads: One White
Southerner’s Education in Civil Rights” and “The 1965 Southern
Literary Festival: A Microcosm of the Civil Rights Movement.”

In 1978 Hamblin met Louis
Daniel Brodsky, the noted Faulkner collector from St. Louis.
Since that time the two men have worked together to produce books,
articles, and public lectures based on the materials in the Brodsky
Collection  most notably Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide
to the Brodsky Collection (5 vols., UP of Mississippi, 1982-88).
Hamblin and Brodsky have edited four of Faulkner’s screenplays: The De Gaulle Story, Battle Cry, Country Lawyer, and Stallion Road. In 1989 Southeast Missouri State University acquired the Brodsky
Collection and created its Center for Faulkner Studies. Hamblin
has been the director of the Center since its inception.

Hamblin has taught Faulkner seminars
for both the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the Missouri
Humanities Council. A frequent presenter at the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, he is one of the originators of the “Teaching Faulkner” sessions at that conference and edits Teaching
Faulkner, a newsletter devoted to the teaching of Faulkner works in university, college, and high school classes. He is the coeditor (with Charles A. Peek, University of Nebraska at Kearney) of A William Faulkner Encyclopedia (Greenwood Press, 1999) and A Companion to Faulkner Studies (Greenwood Press, 2004). He has also coedited Teaching Faulkner: Approaches and Methods (with Stephen Hahn, William Paterson University; Greenwood Press, 2000); Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century (with Ann J. Abadie, University of Mississippi; UP of Mississippi, 2003); Critical Companion to William Faulkner (with A. Nicholas Fargnoli, Molloy University, and Michael Golay, Phillips Exeter Academy; Facts on File, 2008); and Faulkner and Twain (with Melanie Speight, Ste. Genevieve High School; Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2009).

Hamblin has presented Faulkner seminars and lectures in England, the Netherlands, Japan, China, and Taiwan, as well as throughout the United States. In 2005 he led the online discussion of As I Lay Dying for the Oprah Book Club during Oprah Winfrey’s “Summer of Faulkner.”

In addition to his Faulkner work, Hamblin has published five volumes of poems—Perpendicular Rain (1986); From the Ground Up (1992); Mind the Gap: Poems by an American in London (2003); Keeping Score: Sports Poems for Every Season (2008); and Crossroads: Poems of a Mississippi Childhood (2010); two personal memoirs—Bless You, My Father (2006) and This House, This Town: One Couple’s Love Affair with An Old House and a Historic Town (2010); a sports biography, Win or Win: A Season with Ron Shumate (1993); and critical treatments of Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, Pat Conroy, W.P. Kinsella, Willie Morris, Isaac Singer, John Faulkner, and Evans Harrington.

Hamblin has received a number of honors and awards, including a Governor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Missouri Library Association’s Literary Award, the PRIDE award from Southeast Missouri State University, the Halsell Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society, and research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Missouri Humanities Council.

“Beyond the Edge of the Map: Faulkner, Turner, and the Frontier Line.” Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.154-71.

“Teaching Intruder in the Dust Through Its Political and Historical Context.” Teaching Faulkner: Approaches and Methods, ed. Stephen Hahn and Robert W. Hamblin. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000, 151-62. Reprinted in A Gathering of Evidence: Essays on William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, ed. Michel Gresset and Patrick Samway, S.J. Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press, 2004, 57-73.

“Understanding and Enhancing the Human Experience: The New University Studies Program at Southeast Missouri State University.” Perspectives: The Journal of the Association for General and Liberal Studies 18 (Spring 1988), 48-54. (Co-authored with other members of the University Studies Committee)